We Asked the ‘Future of Truth’ Author to Explain How He Used AI. It Didn’t Go Well

Earlier this month, WIRED published an excerpt from Steve Rosenbaum’s buzzy new book, The Future of Truth, which looks at how artificial intelligence warps people’s sense of reality. Shortly thereafter, The New York Times reported that the book contained over a half-dozen made-up or misattributed quotes. In a statement, Rosenbaum, who has a master's degree in "truth" from New York University, admitted that he had accidentally included “a handful” of “improperly attributed or synthetic” quotes. In an ironic twist, the veracity of a book about how AI impacts truth was now under intense scrutiny because of how its author had used AI.

After the Times story broke, WIRED took another look at our 1,450-word excerpt. The fact-checking team had reviewed it prior to publication, and we reconfirmed that its quotes and facts were accurate. But WIRED’s generative AI editorial policy prohibits the publication of AI-generated and AI-edited writing, and a reader email calling out the excerpt as being “blatantly AI-written” raised further questions about the extent to which Rosenbaum had used AI tools. In The Future of Truth’s acknowledgement section, Rosenbaum writes that ChatGPT, Claude, NaturalReaders, ProWritingAid, and Grammarly had helped “refine and polish the presentation of [his] ideas.” What, exactly, did that mean?

WIRED ran the excerpt through several AI-detection services, including Pangram, GPTZero, and ZeroGPT. Each service suggested that it was either likely AI-generated, or AI-generated with high confidence. But AI-detection tools are fallible, and can return inaccurate readings. So WIRED’s head of research emailed Rosenbaum directly to ask if and how he had used AI to write the excerpt.

He wrote back: “Like many writers working today, I used AI tools during parts of the research and editorial development process for the book, including source discovery, brainstorming, structural feedback, and language refinement.” But, he stressed, “the ideas, reporting, arguments, and final authorship are mine, and the WIRED excerpt was not generated by AI and then simply published as-is.” He urged WIRED’s editors to exercise caution trusting AI detection tools, noting that false positives can occur.

At this point, WIRED’s senior editors asked me to look into the episode, because I’ve covered AI slop in its various forms since 2024. My first step was to run the entire text of the book through Pangram’s detection tool. (While all AI-detection tools have limitations, and can show false-positives, Pangram is the current gold standard.) It came back that the book appeared to be 53 percent AI-generated, with an additional 9 percent registering as likely AI-assisted.

I called Rosenbaum and asked for a more detailed description of how he’d used AI to write the book, and whether he disputed Pangram’s results. (BenBella Books, whose imprint published The Future of Truth, did not return requests for comment. Simon & Schuster, which distributes BenBella’s books in the United States, declined to comment.)

Rosenbaum would not weigh in on the accuracy of Pangram’s results. In fact, he didn’t want to talk about them at all. “I don’t participate in that conversation,” he said. “It’s like saying, do you beat your wife? It’s one of those accusations that there’s no response to.”

He offered, instead, to broadly explain his editorial process. He says that at the beginning of the writing process, he used AI tools as search engines, helping him surface information for the more research-heavy sections of the book. To demonstrate how he might do this, he asked ChatGPT to describe me, then read the results out loud. The AI search more or less accurately described some of my prior stories, including work on AI-generated “zombie media sites.”